Before he became one of Nigeria’s most recognised cybersecurity professionals, Professor Peter Obadare was selling Maggi on the bridge at Eko Idumota Bridge. He had no grand business plan, no established network and no guarantee that the future would work out as he hoped. What he had was hunger, both literal and figurative, and an unusual determination to keep moving.
“I was selling Maggi,” Obadare recalled. “Poverty is hard work.” He remembers waking up without transport money and trekking long distances, including from Ikorodu Motor Park to Mile 12. Those experiences, though difficult, would later become part of the foundation upon which he built his entrepreneurial philosophy.
Today, Obadare is the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Digital Encode, a cybersecurity and digital trust company that has grown into a major player in Nigeria’s technology ecosystem. But his story did not begin with cybersecurity. It began with survival, curiosity, discipline and a willingness to acquire knowledge wherever he could find it.
Obadare describes himself as an “accidental entrepreneur” who eventually became a disciplined one. His early entrepreneurial experience included selling products on the streets of Lagos and working as a houseboy for a well-to-do family. The latter experience exposed him to a different standard of living and broadened his understanding of what was possible.
His time selling on the bridge also taught him something that formal education could not: commercial instinct. He watched how people bought, how sellers competed and how tiny changes in pricing could influence demand. At one point, while others sold Maggi at the prevailing price, he experimented with selling three cubes for five naira. The difference was small, but the response was immediate. Customers rushed to buy from him.
It was an early lesson in differentiation, value and commercialisation, principles that would eventually become central to his approach to business.
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Obadare later returned to school and studied Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the Federal Polytechnic in Osun State. By the time he completed his OND, he was already 25. While his contemporaries were excited about progressing into conventional careers, he was confronted by an uncomfortable reality. Many companies did not want to employ OND holders for the kinds of technology roles he desired.
Rather than allowing that limitation to define his career, he began searching for another route.
His first major exposure to computing came during an internship at M-Pact, an IT solutions company, around 1998. There, he encountered computers and the internet for the first time. He was exposed to hardware, software development, websites and other emerging technologies. The experience opened his mind to a world that was still largely unfamiliar to many Nigerians.
Obadare realised that computing was where he wanted to build his future. He began selling computers and eventually started operating under different informal business names before settling on a more structured identity.
The transformation came through training.
In 2004, he encountered Fate Foundation after an aunt introduced him to the organisation. At the time, the cost of participating in its entrepreneurship programme was significant for him, but he found a way to attend. What he encountered was radically different from the informal hustling that had characterised his earlier business life.
At Fate Foundation, he encountered concepts such as vision and mission statements, business structures, accounting, branding and strategic planning. He began to understand entrepreneurship not merely as the ability to make money, but as a discipline requiring systems, knowledge and intentionality.
“Fate Foundation actually metamorphosed me from an accidental entrepreneur to a disciplined entrepreneur,” he said.
The experience also challenged his original business identity. He had been using names such as Peter Com Technologies, but he eventually recognised the need for a more distinctive and scalable brand. The name Digital Encode emerged during an ordinary conversation with a friend and, after researching its availability, Obadare adopted it.
What followed was a deliberate process of building expertise.
He moved from selling computer systems into networking, recognising that customers who purchased computers would eventually need those machines connected. He became a Cisco partner and pursued professional certifications aggressively. By 2005, he had accumulated several Cisco credentials, including CCNA and CCNP, and was working toward the highly demanding CCIE certification.
The qualifications became a form of leverage. His OND no longer represented the entire story of his professional identity. Knowledge and certifications were helping him build a new form of credibility.
Obadare calls this “knowledge banking”—the deliberate accumulation of knowledge that can later be converted into business opportunities.
His philosophy was tested when he entered increasingly competitive markets. Large companies dominated networking, and competing against established organisations required more than technical ability. It required identifying where the next opportunity would emerge.
That opportunity eventually appeared in cybersecurity.
While working in networking, Obadare began seeing the emerging need to protect the infrastructure businesses were building. At the time, cybersecurity was still a relatively unfamiliar concept in Nigeria. Rather than seeing its obscurity as a disadvantage, he saw an emerging market.
But he understood that entering the market required knowledge.
He encountered Linux technology through another young professional, Sheyi Akindeyi. Rather than pretending to know everything, Obadare became a student again. He enrolled for training, acquired the knowledge he needed and quickly connected that knowledge to an existing customer opportunity.
The relationship eventually developed into a partnership. Obadare brought commercialisation and business development, while the technical partnership strengthened the company’s capabilities. Together, they began building what would become Digital Encode.
The journey was not without resistance. Large organisations questioned whether two young Nigerian professionals could compete with established international brands. Obadare remembers being treated as one of the “small boys” in an industry dominated by large corporations and foreign technology companies.
Their response was not to complain about the perception. They built expertise.
They pursued international certifications, strengthened technical capabilities and invested heavily in research and development. Obadare eventually became the first EC-Council licensed penetration tester in Africa, giving the company another credential with which to establish credibility.
But technical expertise alone did not immediately solve the problem.
In 2009, Digital Encode presented to a major bank and received an encouraging response. The technical presentation was well received, yet the expected engagement did not materialise. The reason was not technical competence. The company lacked the brand reputation that would make a large financial institution comfortable entrusting critical systems to it.
For Obadare, that became another turning point.
He returned to his SWOT analysis and identified brand credibility as a weakness. His solution was not simply to advertise more. He studied the companies he wanted to compete with, researched their executives and partners and examined the programmes that had helped establish their reputations.
That research led him to Harvard Business School’s programme for leading professional service firms.
The investment was substantial, but Obadare saw it as an investment in capability and credibility rather than consumption. He attended the programme and returned with a broader understanding of how leading professional service businesses were structured, positioned and commercialised.
Soon after, an opportunity demonstrated the value of that investment.
During the 2014–2015 period, the Ebola outbreak disrupted international travel, and a bank that needed an expert facilitator for a board-level programme was unable to bring in its preferred foreign resource. Obadare’s profile combined technical cybersecurity credentials with the Harvard programme. He was selected.
He delivered the engagement and subsequently secured substantial business from the relationship.
For Obadare, the lesson was straightforward: expertise creates the foundation, but credibility can determine whether the market gives that expertise an opportunity to perform.
Over the years, he continued investing heavily in education and professional development, including programmes at institutions such as Harvard and MIT Sloan. He describes these investments as part of his strategy of building knowledge and leveraging global brands.
His approach to money has been equally deliberate. Obadare argues that founders should resist the temptation to spend early success on symbols of wealth while their businesses remain financially fragile. At Digital Encode, he says the company has maintained significant salary reserves, at times keeping one or more years of payroll in savings.
For him, delayed gratification is not merely a personal virtue. It is a business survival strategy.
His philosophy is built around three interconnected principles: knowledge of the business, commercialisation of that knowledge and continuous development of the business. Knowledge without commercialisation does not create a sustainable enterprise, while commercial success without continuous development can eventually become obsolete.
He also places integrity at the centre of the company’s growth. In cybersecurity, clients must trust consultants with access to sensitive systems and information. Technical competence without integrity, he argues, cannot produce lasting credibility.
That principle has become particularly important as Digital Encode has expanded. The company now serves organisations that require expertise in highly sensitive areas of cybersecurity, risk and digital trust.
Obadare’s experience has also shaped his view of emerging industries. He believes entrepreneurs should pay attention to sectors that are still developing rather than automatically rushing into industries that everyone already understands.
Cybersecurity offered that opportunity when he entered it. Yet he cautions that being early is not enough. Entrepreneurs must continuously learn, adapt and improve their offerings.
His advice to founders entering specialised industries is therefore direct: acquire deep knowledge before chasing visibility.
He is particularly critical of the modern tendency for entrepreneurs to build personal visibility before building expertise. Social media can create the appearance of authority, but the market eventually tests whether the expertise is real.
For Obadare, value must come first. His personal formula is simple: “Give value first. Go above and beyond the call of duty every time.” He connects this to visibility, credibility and ultimately profitability.
The same principle informs his view of trust. Innovation may attract attention, but trust creates durable relationships. Trust is built through excellence, consistency and the ability to deliver repeatedly.
Obadare also believes founders should not become obsessed with perfecting a product before taking it to market. Even the world’s largest technology companies continue to improve their products after launch. Businesses must therefore learn from customers, educate the market and iterate continuously.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of his story is that he does not romanticise hardship. He remembers hunger, financial pressure, rejection and the limitations of his educational background. He remembers being unable to get the jobs he wanted and having to create opportunities for himself. Yet those limitations did not become permanent definitions.
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The young man who once sold Maggi on a Lagos bridge eventually learned to read markets. The OND holder who struggled to secure conventional employment built expertise that could compete internationally. The entrepreneur who started informally learned the disciplines of structure, branding, strategy and financial management. The “small boy” that established companies once overlooked built credibility through knowledge, certifications, partnerships and relentless development.
His story ultimately illustrates a broader principle of entrepreneurship: opportunities are often discovered by people who are close enough to a problem to recognise its potential.
For Obadare, the journey from street commerce to cybersecurity was not a straight line. It was a sequence of observations, pivots, investments in knowledge and calculated decisions to move into the next opportunity.
Today, his message to entrepreneurs remains remarkably close to the lessons he learned at the beginning: know your business, understand how to commercialise your knowledge, keep developing, build trust, manage your resources carefully and never stop learning.
The boy who once had to negotiate the price of Maggi on a Lagos bridge eventually learned to negotiate at the highest levels of the technology industry. His greatest competitive advantage, however, was never simply technology. It was the willingness to keep acquiring knowledge and turning that knowledge into value.
In Obadare’s entrepreneurial playbook, knowledge is capital, credibility is leverage, trust is currency and disciplined execution is what turns opportunity into an enduring enterprise.
